No flights for seven days

November 14, 2012

A panorama from the Rothera hangar to South Cove. On the right is a Basler aircraft called Polar 6 that has stopped in Rothera en route to Neumayer Station and operated by the Alfred Wegner Institute. All other aircraft on station are hunkered down in the hangar today awaiting a break in the weather.

Terry writes:

Haven’t flown since November 7. I have been doing eight-lap runs around the runway in between testing our instruments. Each lap is a little more than a mile. When its too snowy and blowy, I run on the treadmill.

On November 9, the Lake Ellsworth drilling team arrived via Dash-7, and about two hours later we had our first fire drill while I was doing stretches in my room. With the fire alarm blasting, I hurried into my boots and jacket. I hustled down to New Bransfield house, the primary emergency muster point, where each on-site person needed to check in. After a couple of minutes, the alarms ceased, and everyone went back to what they had been doing.

I decided to replace the ten-image 2001 UTC acquisition at Flask AMIGOS-3 with a 0901 UTC acquisition so that Steve Crampton, Rothera’s weather forecaster, could have it available when preparing his 0745 Rothera Time (i.e. 1045 UTC) daily weather briefing for the pilots and field teams. I first uploaded the changes to AMIGOS-2 in Boulder, then AMIGOS-3 on Flask.

On November 11, I worked as a “gash” all day, mostly cleaning the bar after the usual Saturday night revelry, cleaning the upstairs washrooms in New Bransfield, and washing pots in the kitchen. After that, I played guitar after dinner with three other guys in the music room in Old Bransfield.

The weather has been bad the last three days. It had been snowing and blowing in Rothera, and presumably in the Larsen B region. Still not getting the 0901 image on AMIGOS-3. Investigation showed that the updated schedule checker script did not finish loading, so I reloaded a copy this time to a temporary file, verified that the copy loaded ok, then renamed it.

I started getting Roger Stilwell up to speed on the AMIGOS and cGPS instrument upgrade and repairs, as it appears Roger will be replacing Malcolm Airey who will start working with another field group.

Looks like I’ll be flying tomorrow to Scar Inlet with Roger, Daniel, Daniel’s field assistant Ash Fusiarski, and a pilot to service the Scar Inlet AMIGOS-4 and Daniel’s Scar Inlet GPS, and whatever else we might have time for.